“I hid him in that tree.” Her grandfather nodded at the famous one, its lopsided head barely visible in the gloom. “Gave him a ladder to climb with, and my wife Joan—you’re named for her—she fetched two pillows to cushion him. William Carlis sat there with His Majesty all through the day, while those Roundhead dogs searched high and low, but we never said a word.”

"Not me," Isaac said. "But all things are connected in the Ayn Sof. Maybe I can help him be found. Hochmah and Binah. Wisdom and understanding. Seventy-three and sixty-seven—a hundred and forty." He felt a change in the air and knew that Mansour, too, had risen; he turned to the house to get the things he would need before they went to the university. The smoke of burning Tuluz came to him one more time, and his familiar home had the smell of death.